Box office hits like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield helped establish the “found footage” chiller as a legitimate (and lucrative) sub-genre, but a found audio variation on the theme is a much tougher sell in a predominantly visual medium.
The proliferation of podcasts in recent times may seem like a solid starting point for such fare, if the filmmaker can find something more interesting to focus on than an individual sat at a desk and wearing headphones, and in that respect Undertone gives itself a mountain to climb.
Nina Kiri stars as Evy, co-host of a series investigating paranormal events in which she fulfils the role of the skeptic debunking theories put forward by her more easily convinced and remote (ie unseen) colleague Justin, played by Adam DiMarco.
Justin passes on an anonymous email he’s received containing a string of random letters and 10 short audio files that suggest all is not well in the world of a young couple who’ve been recording each other in their sleep – cue Evy’s nonplussed face when she hears sleepy renditions of nursery rhymes which, Justin claims, reveal murderous messages when played backwards.
“Mike, kill all,” says one, according to Justin, prompting Evy to do a bit of extra-curricular digging and discover that the reversed rendition her own childhood favourite, Baa Baa Black Sheep, seemingly instructs the listener to "lick the blood off".
While all this is going on, writer-director Ian Tuason drip-feeds his audience a few facts about Evy; she’s caring for her invalid, comatose mother in an otherwise empty house, while wrestling with alcoholism and processing recent news of pregnancy.
That’s about it, in terms of character development, so the narrative drive falls on the shoulders of the mysterious audio files gradually revealing more undefined terror from afar, but Evy and Justin pointlessly limiting themselves to playing just one fresh file per night is a baffling state of affairs that doesn’t do the story any favours.
Sound recordings have been integral to movie plots in the past (think Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, or Brian De Palma’s Blow Out), but here the lens is trained exclusively on one character for three-quarters of the running time and struggles to hold viewers’ attention.
To prevent boredom setting in, that character needs to be played by an expressive actor capable of relaying a range of emotions, and unfortunately Kiri’s largely stony face is more akin to a jaded call centre worker, or someone sitting statue-still for a passport photo and waiting for minutes on end to hear the click of a camera.
View Green Video on the source websiteOccasionally, but nowhere near often enough, she conveys a hint of vulnerability as she reflects on how the contents of the files chime with events from her own past – although childhood memories of London Bridge and sundry other playground singalongs are hardly the stuff of revelatory twists, and only underline the shortcomings of a script that is sorely lacking in surprises.
In all fairness, Tuason ups the ante in the last reel, the pedestrian tease of what went before giving way to more palpably spooky shenanigans, but it’s a ludicrously long wait for the yarn to step up a gear that runs the risk of the audience having already given up on the whole affair.
Like the aforementioned Blair Witch Project, the film was made on a shoestring budget (approximately half a million dollars) and turned a profit relatively quickly, taking $20 million at the North American box office since its release in early March.
Consequently, it can be deemed a financial success, if not necessarily a creative one; this particular Undertone is ultimately, frustratingly, under-cooked and underwhelming.
Undertone is released in UK cinemas on Friday 10 April.
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